


Asphyxia

by CloudDreamer



Series: Demon Eyes [11]
Category: Dr Carmilla (Musician), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Abuser POV, Canonical Child Abuse, Dr Carmilla's A+ Parenting, Hypocrisy, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Dubiously Consensual Science, Projecting Much?, Suicidal Intent, Vampires, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:33:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23719759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: She’s made many mistakes in her long life, but she has to admit her Mechanisms were among the worst of them.
Relationships: Dr Carmilla & Jonny d'Ville
Series: Demon Eyes [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698556
Comments: 4
Kudos: 39
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	Asphyxia

**Author's Note:**

> This is an explicit depiction of abuse from the perspective of an abuser. So, be careful.

“What the hell did you do?” she demands, drawing up to her full height.

Jonathan just smirks. His clothes are barely torn, thanks to her hard work, but they’re covered in blood. Too much blood, only most of it his own. She knows the look in his eyes, she’s seen it in the mirror often enough after she’s just fed but before the high wears off, but he doesn’t have that. He’s not a vampire. _He’s not_ like her. She made mistakes with him, mistakes she was working on finding a way around, but they weren’t that bad. They couldn’t have been that bad. 

“Oh, you care now?” he says, and it’s halfway to a laugh. He says it again, and this time, he does laugh. He shakes badly, like a wind in a hurricane, but doesn’t fall over. His feet are planted firmly on Aurora’s surface. 

“Yes, of course I care,” she hisses, stalking forward. Her one working eye is focused entirely on him. He’d left with her guns and returned with nothing more than scrap metal to show for it. He can’t scar anymore, but if he could, his hands would show where he’d broken them repeatedly, punching through metal. “I’ve always cared.” 

“Don’t seem to give much of a shit when it’s you depopulating a planet, fuck, you’ve done worse than just kill the bastards. Sometimes you even leave them alive, or, hey, don’t let them die at all. I’ve seen it, you know, you didn’t exactly care when you were elbow deep in motherfucker. Wait, it’s not that you don’t care, you love it. You love what you do, you’re always so happy afterwards. Honestly, I’m surprised you ain’t proud of me, _Doc_ , at least I’m honest enough to hold up in my lab to sob for a month, feeling guilty over shit I enjoy—“ 

Carmilla hits him. She doesn’t mean to, except for the part where she entirely does. The only words in her head are _shut up, shut up, shut up_ , and she doesn’t realize she’s screamed them until she looks at his face.

He goes flying. Literally. He was already off kilter, and she could’ve snapped his neck if she lost track during a gentle embrace. That wasn’t a gentle embrace. She’s lucky the two of them were a good distance inside Aurora, because the force is enough to drive him through at least one wall. She knows the sound of bones breaking, knows that much strength would’ve shattered his skull. For anyone else, that’d be it. There’d be more blood on her hands, but that’d be it. She’s betrayed the trust of people she cares about more times than she can count, but those times, when it was over, it was over. 

But when she steps closer, inspecting the damages, he’s laughing with tears in his eyes. She knows how much what she just did should hurt. It’s been dozens of millennia since she’s processed pain normally, but the memories of all the times she screamed her throat ragged, sobbed herself to sleep from the aftershocks of brutal lighting running up and down her body don’t fade. They’re what sticks with her, when she destroys everything she loves, and he’s still laughing. 

“Knew it,” he chokes out as his vocal cords heal. “You’re a fucking hypocrite, I knew it—“ 

And he still won’t shut up. She grabs the collar of his shirt and drags him off the floor. It’s barely an effort. Carmilla notices her hand is covered in his blood from some distant place, not quite the same place that’s screaming at her to stop but close enough. She opens her mouth and bares her teeth, right in Jonathan’s face. He’s right that he’s seen her feed, and he’s right to say she enjoys it, but he was always at a distance. He’s never felt her cold breath on his face, seen her jaguar fangs so close to tearing him apart. She thinks she might be smiling. 

He keeps laughing, but the sound comes between small muffled noises of panic. He kicks out, trying to force her to let go, but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t break her grip. At the end of the day, he is as strong as a malnourished New Texan street brat. As much as she might look the same, albeit from a planet much older and much further gone, she’s got the strength of an eldritch monster running through what used to be veins.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says, and her voice is too calm for the scalding rage boiling in her chest. “You think living a couple decades past your nowhere planet’s life expectancy without changing a bit makes you hot shit? Just because almost everyone you’ve ever known is dead, once over? You think you know what it means to be immortal, that you don’t need to worry about accountability or guilt cuz you were going to out last everyone whose lives you just cut short? Guess what, you fucking monster? You’re wrong. You’re going to have to live with what you did for g-ddamn trillions of years. You think you’re fine with it now? You’ll end up just like your dear old daddy and _me_ , drinking yourself to your grave again and again, because it won’t fucking stick, and the more time you spend blackout drunk, the more shitty choices you make, the more you’ll need to drink to just forget about the whole damn thing. To stop caring.” 

He’s still laughing. 

“Or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll never feel sorry about it, maybe you’ll just keep killing and killing to chase that first high till you realize it doesn’t do anything to you anymore, and you’ll be alone. You’ll be more alone than anyone else in the universe, because you can’t look at anyone without thinking about how easy it would be to destroy them, utterly and completely, and then you’ll try to build something anyway, like an idiot, and it’ll end exactly how you thought it would. You. Alone. Again. And again. And again. And again.” 

Carmilla drops Jonathan in a heap. She’s not hungry; she didn’t just feed. Why does she feel the same? The rage that’d burst through her is gone, and now all that’s left is a poor kid she’s fucked up somewhere between sobbing and laughing at her feet. Guilt burns like acid in her throat, but she can’t apologize, can’t run, because she knew exactly what she was doing. She wanted this. She wanted to make him hurt like he’d hurt her. 

She thinks back to how he used to be and the first words she’d used to describe him. _He has a good heart._

And Carmilla walks away, her fists clenched hard enough to break her bones. She can’t label the storm of feelings in her chest, not right now. She’s not strong enough. She barely makes it to her lab before she collapses, and this time, Aurora isn’t there to comfort her.


End file.
